Those were the two words that leapt off the page. It wasn’t fair. He and Samantha had grown up together. They had been ordinary, happy children and they had been close. And then a bomb had fallen out of the sky and had killed both their parents and taken away everything he had ever known and after that nothing had been the same. He still remembered the day their aunt had said she would be looking after them. He hadn’t liked her from the start, with her hair dyed jet black, her withered cheeks, too much rouge. She behaved like a grande dame, but she still lived in a poky little house in West Kensington. What had Harlan Goodis ever seen in her?

She had always disapproved of him. She had wanted him to get a job like his sister, who’d been packed off to some hellhole in Slough. Accountancy, she had suggested, or maybe dentistry? She had a cousin who was a dentist and who might be able to help him. In his early twenties, Algernon had come to blame Aunt Joyce for the loss of his early life almost as much as he blamed the Germans – and his inevitable slide into the world of underhand dealing and crime had surely been her fault too.

Not that he had ever been a criminal. Not really. It had just been chance that had put him outside that club in Piccadilly even as a fight – an affray – broke out. If he hadn’t been drinking, he would never have joined in. He still remembered the trial, the way Aunt Joyce had looked at him as he was sent down for three months for disturbing the public order. She had looked even more disgusted than the judge! Before he had been taken down, he had turned round and stuck his tongue out at her and that was the last time he had seen her. He’d been glad when she’d packed her bags and gone off to America.

And now, all these years later, she had shown him what she thought of him. She hadn’t just favoured Samantha over him. She had deliberately slapped him in the face. There was a tiny part of him that regretted that last gesture in the courtroom. It had cost him a half-share in what might be a fortune. But maybe he was kidding himself. She had always been a vindictive old bat. She would never have left him a cent.

There was one aspect of his character, however, that Aunt Joyce had underestimated and which Samantha, too, had ignored. Algernon Marsh never gave up. All his life (and unfortunately on that one occasion outside the Nut House) he had been a fighter. For example, he had launched Sun Trap on the back of a string of business failures and although things weren’t looking too good for it right now, it had been remarkably successful, at least up to a point. Samantha might be rich. But Algernon knew things about life in Tawleigh-on-the-Water that she didn’t. He was fairly sure he could use that knowledge to divert a good chunk of the fortune his way. Always assuming there was a fortune to be had.

The telephone rang. Algernon almost dropped his whisky in his haste to answer it.

‘Algie?’

‘Terry! Have you found out anything?’

‘I’ve found out plenty. Hold on to your hat, mate. You’re not going to believe this … ’

V

It was half past nine.

Phyllis and Eric Chandler were sitting in their private living room on the second floor of Clarence Keep. They had been listening to Record Roundabout on the wireless, but after a while Phyllis had grown tired of the comedy interludes and turned it off. Now the two of them were sitting in gloomy silence. Eric had offered her some hot cocoa – they always had cocoa before they went to bed – but she had refused.

‘I’m going to turn in,’ she announced suddenly.

‘Ma … ’ There was a tremble in Eric’s voice. ‘I hate it when you’re like this.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes, you do. You’ve always been like this, even when I was a little boy and you were annoyed with me. You were disappointed with me the moment I was born, weren’t you, because my foot was wrong. And when Dad went away, I know what he meant to you. I know you wish it was me, not him, that died in the war.’

Phyllis crossed her arms. ‘That’s a wicked thing to say, Eric. You should—’

‘I’m not going to wash my mouth out with soap and water! I’m not ten years old!’

The two of them were used to speaking quietly. They knew their place in the house and it was their first duty never to be noticed unless they were needed, never to draw attention to themselves. But Eric had shouted at his mother and her first thought was to glance nervously at the door, making sure it was shut.

‘You shouldn’t have done what you did,’ she hissed quietly. ‘You should never have behaved that way.’

‘You think I like being here? You think I’ve enjoyed working with you all these years?’ His chest was heaving. He was on the edge of tears. ‘You’ve never tried to see things my way. You don’t have any understanding what it’s like being me.’

There was something in his voice that moved her, briefly. But she didn’t go over to him. She didn’t get out of her seat. ‘You shouldn’t have lied to that policeman,’ she said slowly.

‘And you shouldn’t have said what you said!’

‘Maybe not. But I’ve already told you. They’re going to find out anyway. And what do you think is going to happen then?’ She folded her arms. ‘I’ve made a decision, Eric. When this is over and the police leave us alone, I’m going to move in with my sister. I’ve worked long enough. And you’re right, it’s not healthy the two of us being here together.’

He stared at her. ‘What about me?’

‘You can stay here. I’m sure Mr Pendleton will look after you.’ She glanced in the direction of the main house. ‘Did he speak to you this evening?’

Eric had taken Francis Pendleton his supper at seven o’clock and had removed the tray an hour later. The master of the house had barely been out of the bedroom all day, sleeping for several hours after the medicine Dr Collins had given him, and then sitting, apparently doing nothing at all, on his own. He had hardly touched the food.

‘He didn’t say anything.’

‘Well, you’ll have to talk to him.’

‘He won’t keep me on. He won’t even stay here. He’ll sell Clarence Keep and go back to London.’

‘Well, that’s your lookout.’

Eric Chandler’s voice quivered and, to his mother’s disgust, he began to cry. ‘Please, Ma,’ he whimpered. ‘Don’t leave me.’

‘I am leaving you, Eric. I should have done it years ago. After what you’ve been getting up to here, I never want to see you again.’

She got up and turned the wireless back on just as the presenter of Record Roundabout introduced ‘The Blue Danube’ by Johann Strauss. Mother and son sat listening, not looking at each other. Phyllis’s face was stone. Eric was weeping silently. The orchestra struck up and the cheerful waltz began.

VI

Just down the corridor, Francis Pendleton was lying in the darkness, gathering his thoughts. He was neither asleep nor awake but somewhere in between, trying to separate the nightmare of everything that had happened from the reality of where he was now. He wanted to get up but he could barely move; the drug he had taken that morning was still paralysing his system Above all else, there was the crushing weight of grief, the loss of Melissa, who had always been, right up until the end, his one true love. When he thought about her, he no longer wanted to live.

He rolled onto his side and very slowly, like an old man, got to his feet. He was still in the dressing gown and pyjamas that he’d been wearing when the detective chief inspector and that German man had come to see him in the morning. He had forgotten what he had told them and he couldn’t remember their questions either. He hoped he hadn’t given anything away.

He left the room, emerging into the corridor in his bare feet. The house was almost silent, the darkness almost tangible, as if he would have to brush it aside to continue on his way, but the velvet curtain was drawn back and he could hear, very faintly, the sound of waltz music coming from the servants’ lounge. He wanted to tell them to turn it off but he didn’t have the strength.

He had no idea where he was going but he wasn’t surprised when he found himself there. He opened a second door and looked into the master bedroom, the room he had shared with Melissa for the four years of their marriage. No. That wasn’t true. Towards the end, she had wanted more and more to sleep on her own. It had become her room, not theirs.

The moonlight was flooding in through the windows, illuminating the interior, and Francis cast his eye over the bed they had chosen together, the wardrobe that she had found in a little second-hand shop in Salisbury. He glanced at the two ormolu tables and felt a twist in his gut as he realised that the telephone was no longer there. The police had taken it away, of course. Francis stood where he was, framed in the doorway as if pinned there, not daring to go any further in.

He would sell everything, he decided. He would sell the house and the furniture. He—